Be My Horde is a riotous reverse Vampire Survivors

Ever wonder what Vampire Survivors would be like if you were the one unleashing the nightmares? The answer, as Be My Horde proves, is pretty damn awesome. Despite being in Steam Early Access, this reanimation-based roguelike had us hooked from our first purifying peasant.

It casts you as necromancer Moriana who, as her job title suggests, has the handy ability to resurrect the dead. Beginning with some comically tiny villagers, you murder your way around a top-down level, resurrecting fallen foes to add to your horde. And, since Moriana is relatively weak, they serve as a buffer to keep foes away from her.

You can’t re-reanimate the undead, but as Dawn of the Dead put it, “Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!” We felt a little pang of joy each time a formerly formidable foe joined our horde.

How formidable? You start off taking on peasants with pitchforks but get far enough, and you’ll have fireball-flinging magicians coming after you. They may not be undead (yet) but Be My Horde happily unleashes its own hordes against you. On top of the enemies roaming the land, at specific times enemies will crowd on the screen which, at first, had us scratching our heads.

Be My Horde isn’t exactly heavy on story, but we couldn’t wrap our heads around our enemies’ specific timing. But while it might not make much sense from a narrative standpoint (do they have a anti-necromancer timetable?), it does wonders for the game’s tension factor. Leading a massive horde around, steamrollering enemies, gave us an amazing sense of power. But we knew that when that clock hit 10:00, 50+ axe-wielding dwarves and armour clad knights were going to pour onto the screen.

Image: Polished Games

In Be My Horde, complacency is your downfall. You’ll constantly be eyeing your horde, hoping you’ve got enough hard-hitters to take on whatever’s next. But even when Moriana fell (a neat, nasty touch is that her flesh rots away with damage) we leapt right back into the fray, eager for more carnage.

The only time we stayed away from Be My Horde for any length of time was when it crashed, close to the 30 minute mark. It only happened once (this is an Early Access title after all) and, after 20 minutes of angry fist-shaking we were back raising the dead.

If you’ve a taste for macabre mayhem or love turning enemies against their former friends, then Be My Horde is a must-play. It’s available now on Steam, priced at £4.29/$4.49 with a 10% launch discount on top of that.